Judith has made it clear that she will have nothing to do with the shop. She will absolutely not engage with the preparation or the sale of food. She escapes each morning to work in the neonatal unit of a London teaching hospital now that the Cambridge junior fellowship has mercifully come to an end.
‘Christ, Chrissie!’ she says when they meet in London cafés for lunch, as they do from time to time. ‘If there are three things above all others that drive me up the wall, then those things are small children and food and Catholics. So what do I find that I’m doing with my life? I’m working with other people’s substandard babies. Then I come home to two demented Catholics who stink of tahini and aniseed. And if I’m really lucky, then they’ve been messing with fish that day. Remember how you told me once about the halved goats’ heads, Chrissie? Well, I used to think you were joking. One of them is obese and the other one has the gout. Jesus, am I a madwoman, Chrissie? What am I doing with my life?’
Judith and Joe are somewhat extrovert lovers and this can be tiresome for outsiders because they constantly touch each other in public. Judith’s rediscovery of her own heterosexual bias has, if anything, intensified her forcefulness. She had found herself going with women most of the time but merely because all the men on offer had always been such wimps. The problem was that, for all she was stunning – had such great legs, such a shape to die for, such a breathtaking voluminous tumble of dark hair, such small, enticing, predatory teeth – she had tended always to scare men away. That was, until Joe, who was not so easily scared. And then, again, women, of course, have always been inclined to fall for her.
Judith, for all that she is lively, is not that much fun to have lunch with, as Chrissie explains afterwards to her partner. This is because she has such unpleasant eating habits. She will pick for an hour at her spaghetti carbonara and then she will binge on chocolate mousse. She will repeatedly run her finger round the inside of the bowl and lick it, apparently without noticing. And if the waiter brings those corny chocolate peppermints along with the bill, then Judith will gather them up – her own and other people’s – and stuff them into her mouth. She is, of course, an only partially rehabilitated bulimic. She has an undignified, clandestine habit that Joe drags out of the closet. He calls her a ‘goddamn disgusting neurotic’, and he sniffs like a bloodhound at her toothbrush.
‘Just you get yourself in gear, now,’ he says. ‘Just you find yourself some less unattractive behavioural disturbance. You imagine that I will still want to screw you when all your hair and teeth fall out?’
The eating is a real pain for him, but Judith has lots of pluses. It’s fun for him to cohabit with a person who shares his love of clothes. Judith always looks terrific, where Alice’s clothes had been a constant source of let-down. Judith always gets it right. She never fails to turn heads. Also her sharp wit and abrasiveness are a lot of fun for him. Both of them can use their quickness, their verbal flair, as a metaphor and a prelude to the felicitous act of sex.
And so at last to Christina. What has become of her? After the anger over Jago and the anger over Judith, who had played her off so reprehensibly like that, against her mother; after her annoyance with her father for his all too assertive existence within her developmental sphere of consciousness, an existence which had so inconveniently printed upon her mind the reality of the male other; after she had become completely sure that she was not going to find herself sexually attracted to Dulcie, Christina simply stopped, and waited, and took refuge in catching up on the maths.
She was at that time still sharing the house that Papa had bought her with Dulcie and Peter and Victor. Serious Syrius, the Star Dog Two, was in there as well, of course – ‘the foul witch Sycorax’, as Dulcie insisted upon calling her. She was hardly a dog at all, Dulcie thought. She was one of the pampered of the species. A burrowing animal, she spent all day under Peter and Victor’s duvet. She whimpered when the beds were stripped. When Peter and Victor were doing sex together, Serious Syrius, the Star Dog Two, spent the time licking their ankles and their thighs. They were, in many ways, the nicest foursome in the world, but when darling Dulcie began, increasingly, to take out weekends in London, Christina for one smelled a rat.
‘Chris,’ Dulcie said one day, ‘I can’t do this to you. Well, it’s like incest, isn’t it? I’m carrying on with your mum.’
Then one Monday morning, towards midday, when Dulcie had entered, commuter-smart, off the train from King’s Cross and Christina was still in wake-up mode, not yet washed or dressed, there came a knock at the door.
‘Oh, bugger,’ Dulcie said. ‘And we was just going to have ourselves a coffee.’
She got up and pursued a strategy which always drove Christina wild. She lifted the edge of the curtain and peered out at the supplicant who was standing in the street.
‘Blimey,’ she said. ‘It’s an old bloke and two snobby schoolgirls in uniform. Anyone for lacrosse?’
‘Dulcie,’ Christina said. ‘Don’t do that. It’s so rude.’
‘Why?’ Dulcie said. ‘Isn’t it etiquette? Well, you can’t be too careful these days. I reckon we should get one of them spyglass things that helps you to see who’s out there.’
Christina made for the bathroom, where she sought to brush her teeth and wash her face. ‘For Christ’s sake, Dulce!’ she said. ‘Just go and open the door.’
Dulcie proceeded to do so. Having elected to be confrontational, she stared out boldly at Roland Dent and at his two adolescent schoolgirl daughters in their bottle-green uniforms. It was the last day of the girls’ school term, and they were carrying shoe bags and work baskets.
‘Yeah?’ Dulcie said. She employed a most daunting degree of eye contact and took conspicuous note of the shoe bags, as though these were the defective offerings of hawkers. On the shoe bags, Ellen and Lydia had embroidered their initials in neat looping chain-stitch, as required by the school regulations.
‘What you want?’ Dulcie said.
‘I believe,’ Roland said, ‘that Christina Angeletti lives here.’
‘And what if she does?’ Dulcie said, so belligerently that it made Roland smile. The girl was as tall as an Amazon, he thought, and she had her hand pointedly across the access, rather as if she thought he might try and take the place by storm.
‘She was a pupil of mine,’ he said mildly. ‘Is she at home, do you know?’
Dulcie weighed him in the balance. ‘Hold on,’ she said.
The next thing she did was to close the door. From the front step, Roland could hear that she was calling out to Christina.
‘Chris!’ she yelled loudly. ‘It’s some teacher bloke. He says are you at home. D’you reckon it’s okay to let him in?’
From the washbasin, Christina cringed and died. ‘For Christ’s sake!’ she hissed, swilling toothpaste froth through her mouth. ‘Dulcie, ask them in!’
Dulcie once again opened the door. ‘She says to come in, and wipe your feet,’ she said. She added, for good measure, ‘She’s on the toilet, see.’
Roland ushered his daughters into the hall. Then he entered himself. All three of them wiped their feet prodigiously before Dulcie directed them to the sofa.
When Christina entered the living-room, she saw that Roland was sitting there with his size twelve feet in beige desert boots and his elbows just about to emerge from the sleeves of some classy-looking porridge-coloured home-knit. He was flanked by Ellen and Lydia, whose shoe bags were lying at their feet. All three of them had the facial bones and skin tones so prevalent in the portraits of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Dulcie was eyeing them from the chair opposite, rather as though she had just apprehended them in the act of breaking open the safe.
‘Roland!’ Christina said with her widest, nicest smile, and the three of them rose to greet her. She and Roland exchanged kisses and the girls allowed themselves to be hugged.
‘You’ve met Dulcie,’ Christina said. Then to Dulcie she said, ‘Roland is Peter’s step-father. Ellen and Lydia are Peter’s half-sisters.�
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Dulcie got up. She shrugged. ‘So why’d he say he was a teacher?’ she said. ‘Chris, I’ve got me supervision in twenty minutes.’
Once Dulcie had gone, Christina hovered, standing. Her visitors, in consequence, were all too polite to sit down.
‘Peter’s in France, I’m afraid,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ Roland said. ‘Yes, I know that. My dear, the girls and I – we wondered whether you would join us for lunch?’
They waited while she got dressed and brushed her hair. Then Roland drove them to Brown’s.
‘But I don’t eat meat, remember,’ she said when, with one voice, they recommended to her the pork ribs and the pies.
After that he drove to deposit his girls with their mother at Hugo’s house. Ellen and Lydia were at a boarding school in Cambridgeshire. This meant that Gentille could have access to her daughters, though Roland, backed by Ellen and Lydia, had insisted that they board. This was in order to minimize necessary contact hours with Hugo. Afterwards Christina and Roland paid a visit to the Fitzwilliam Museum, where Roland, she thought, spent far too much time looking at chainmail and suits of armour. He seemed very taken by a suit of armour that had been made for a very large horse.
‘Do you ride, Christina?’ he said and, when she shook her head, he said, ‘Pity.’ Then he took her to tea at Fitzbillies.
‘Your friend,’ he said, playing mother over the teapot, ‘the tall girl –’
‘What about her?’ Christina said, somehow so pre-emptingly that Roland did not go on. They merely forked up their carrot cake in silence.
‘I never liked your wife,’ Christina said eventually. ‘Do you remember that?’
‘More tea there?’ Roland said, and once again they both said nothing.
Two weeks later he came again, this time without his daughters. Peter, she told him, was still in France.
‘Yes, I know that,’ Roland said again.
This time they visited the Kettles Yard Gallery and then they ate supper in a vegetarian restaurant off King’s Parade, where Roland’s green and yellow peppers and little yellow gourds and tiny corn-cobs came pleasantly shiny, bathed in a sesame sauce. The vegetables lay on a bed of red lettuce leaves interspersed with star fruit and cherries. Christina ate exquisite pastries made of filo and Roquefort cheese: they came shaped like three-leafed clovers. Intersecting circles.
‘They’re Venn diagrams,’ Christina said. ‘Look, Roland. Do you think much about the Trinity? Dulcie says that the whole idea is crap. She says it’s all to do with the tripartite structure of male parts.’
Roland merely spiked another gourd and smiled and made no reply.
And then he came again. And again. He was always rather silent and stiff and grave. Dulcie refused to warm to him. She refused to address him properly. She either called him ‘that teacher bloke’, or she called him ‘Old Sir Rowland de Boys’. She said he came because he liked the cricket nets he could see from out the back.
Christina began to wait for his visits with a combination of longing and dread. She began to cry herself to sleep at night. Then she began to cry and stay awake. One day Roland came to the door, but his visit was not for her.
‘My dear,’ he said, with no explanation. ‘I believe that Peter is expecting me.’ Then the two of them went off together, while she was left at home.
Christina then sat down and cried. ‘Look at me,’ she said to herself. ‘I’ve begun to cry in the daytime.’
Roland, having collected Peter, had gone on to collect his daughters. They ate lunch in a country pub.
‘I have something to say to all of you,’ he said, once they had attacked their apple pies. ‘It concerns our mutual friend Christina. I have thought about this long and hard, and I’d prefer to have your approval. I intend to ask her to marry me. I have no idea as yet how she will respond.’
Peter and the girls looked awkwardly at each other. Then they looked at their feet. The girls were both deeply embarrassed.
‘But why are you asking us?’ Ellen said. ‘Anyway, isn’t she gay?’
‘Oh, yuck,’ Lydia said. ‘She isn’t!’
‘Oh, please,’ Ellen said. ‘Grow up, Lydia. What’s wrong with being gay? Try taking a look at Peter.’
‘Peter’s a boy,’ Lydia said. ‘That’s different. It’s not so disgusting. Anyway, I’ll bet you she isn’t.’
Ellen uttered a patronizing sigh. ‘Then what about that girl?’ she said. ‘It’s written all over her.’
‘That coloured girl?’ Lydia said. ‘Why is it “written all over her”?’
‘Say “black”, Lydia,’ Ellen said. ‘ “Coloured” is so racist.’
‘Why is it racist?’ Lydia said. ‘ “Black” is more coloured than “coloured”.’
‘Quite,’ Ellen said. ‘That’s precisely the point.’
‘You’re mad,’ Lydia said.
Roland coughed. ‘Oh, dear,’ he said. ‘Oh, dear. Ellen, I must admit that what you say has never occurred to me.’
Peter was hardly listening to them. He was wanting Victor to be there. Victor thought that Peter’s sisters were the best entertainment in the world. ‘Les jeunes filles anglaises,’ he said, ‘sont les plus drôles du monde.’
When Roland proposed marriage to her, Christina burst into tears. The idea so rudely confronted her own yearnings and dragged them into the daylight. She buried her face in the porridge-coloured sweater and said, ‘Um’ and ‘Hum’ and ‘Sorry’. Finally she wiped her nose and she said, ‘Yes, please. I’d love to.’
‘But isn’t he too old?’ Dulcie said. ‘And isn’t it a bit like incest?’
‘Well, coming from you,’ Christina said, ‘I consider that a bit rich.’
Pam and Jago were pleased about it, but Papa and Mama were shocked.
‘But are you sure?’ Alice said nervously. ‘Chrissie, dear, it hardly seems suitable.’
Alice was finding it hard to understand that her own daughter could wish to espouse a middle-aged man whose youthful embrace she herself had risked drowning to avoid.
Her father was more sanguine. ‘He’s a thoroughly nice man, Chrissie,’ Joe said. ‘Excuse me, but isn’t he just a bit of a constipated Brit?’
Christina withheld their opinions from Roland, but she poured them out over Peter. Peter had no problem with the idea. If it felt right, he said, she should go for it. It entertained him to think that the person he thought of as his soul sister was about to become his mother.
‘The trouble is,’ Christina told him irritably, ‘the trouble is my parents. Well, just look at them. My father is shacked up in a ménage à trois with a demented medic and a defrocked priest. My mother is co-habiting with a woman who happens to be my best friend. So, what is it that shocks them? Me, wanting to make a conventional marriage with a dependable Anglican headmaster.’ She had not even begun to tell her grandmothers.
Roland was not in favour of waiting long, or of sweeping Christina abroad. He was always happiest at home. Yet he resisted the idea of taking her back in the holiday to his headmaster’s house; of taking her by the hand and leading her upstairs to that wide, white, elegant bedroom with its stucco swans on the ceiling and its nest of white duck-down pillows. He felt, given Gentille’s recent sojourn there, that Christina might be distracted from the pleasure of the business in hand.
Since he had always loved English woodland, he took her instead to a small, ancient inn in a Berkshire village that he remembered from years of hiking through beech groves with the Ordnance Survey map in hand.
‘ “Welcome to Nettlebed”!’ Christina said out loud, reading the sign at the entrance to the village as they passed it.
The beamed doorways of the inn were designed for persons of restricted growth. The upstairs floorboards had taken on giddy and varied gradients. Christina spent some time having fun with the kettle and the sachets of Cadbury’s Chocolate Break. She had already decided that the cosiest thing to do would be to join Roland and train to become a high-school maths teac
her.
‘Nettlebed,’ she said severely, ‘is not a very sexy name.’
‘Christina,’ Roland said, so that she stopped playing with the sachets and rose and crossed the floor to him. ‘Christina,’ he said. And then he kissed her.
She thought, what a satisfactory, what an obvious conclusion. He had always been the only person who had consistently called her Christina. For everybody else she had always been merely Chris or Chrissie. And then, because she was slightly on edge, she found it difficult not to chatter.
‘I think,’ she said, ‘that I had better lie down and close my eyes and think of Venn diagrams.’
A Note on the Author
BARBARA TRAPIDO was born in South Africa and is the author of six novels – Brother of the More Famous Jack (winner of a Whitbread special prize for fiction), Noah’s Ark, Temples of Delight (shortlisted for the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award), Juggling, The Travelling Hornplayer (shortlisted for the 1998 Whitbread Novel Award), and Frankie and Stankie. She lives in Oxford.
Also Available by Barbara Trapido
Brother of the More Famous Jack
Winner of the Whitbread Special Prize for Fiction With an introduction by Rachel Cusk
Stylish, suburban Katherine is eighteen when she is propelled into the centre of Professor Jacob Goldman’s rambling home and his large eccentric family. As his enchanting yet sharp-tongued wife Jane gives birth to her sixth child, Katherine meets the volatile, stroppy Jonathan and his older, more beautiful brother Roger, who wins her heart. First love quickly leads to heartbreak and sends her fleeing to Rome but, ten years on, she returns to find the Goldmans again. A little wiser and a lot more grown-up, Katherine faces her future.
Brother of the More Famous Jack is Barbara Trapido’s highly acclaimed and much loved debut; a book that redefined the coming-of-age novel.
‘Moving, intense, earthy and witty’
The Times
‘A story, like Mansfield Park, of falling in love with a whole family. . . Accomplished and witty’
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